Jazz South Breakthrough Sessions – gigs featuring brand new music from talented emerging artists selected for Jazz South’s Breakthrough Commissions. Here are the individual commission recordings and artist interviews. 

4 awards of up to £3,000 were offered to early career composers. Supported by a package of mentoring, each selected composer created a new piece for digital broadcast from a venue in the Jazz South region in 2021.

Find out more about the 4 composers selected for Breakthrough Commissions here.

Roella Oloro

Performing at Brunel Good Shed in Stroud, multi-instrumentalist Roella Oloro explores the concept of a perfumer, mixing styles and influences from jazz, gospel, classical and rock in her piece ‘Sentient Sounds’.

Lucinda Fosker

Performing at Norden Farm Centre for the Arts, Maidenhead, vocalist and songwriter Lucinda Fosker presents ‘Riverways’, an aural and visual journey along the River Thames, inspired by four contrasting places along a stretch she has known and loved all her life.

Asha Parkinson

Performing at the University of Kent’s Colyer Fergusson Music Building, Asha Parkinson presents ‘Encounters’, a new suite for saxophone, string quartet, qanun, Arabic percussion and voice. ‘Encounters’ inhabits a sound world where jazz, Arabic Maqam and contemporary classical music meet with the feminist poetry of Maram Al-Masri.

Tim Davies

Performing at Brunel Good Shed, Stroud, Tim Davies presents a suite for modular synthesiser and jazz quintet entitled ‘The Outer Woods’. Modular synthesis and jazz share significant common ground through their roots in improvisation, and the work explores these parallels by bringing together techniques of modular composition such as micro-sound and west coast synthesis in a jazz performance environment.